Tribulations - Chapter 42

Wesley dusted the oily gray grit from his hands, unable to believe it was over, that he'd destroyed the creature who'd turned him into this terrible, inhuman thing.

How could it have been so easy? No fanfare, no epic battle, only a well-sharpened stake and a moment of misplaced confidence on the part of his adversary. In his heart, Wesley had to admit, he'd wanted Maria's end to be hard. He'd wanted her to suffer as he'd suffered, as she, by proxy, had made his Emmy suffer. More than that, he wanted all the dead to return to their lives, the sun to shine and the birds to sing. He wanted to lie on the soft, warm grass beneath the apple tree with light on his face and Moira's head on his shoulder, her crisp, silken hair brushing his cheek.

That was his definition of peace, and more than anything in the world, Wesley longed for peace, the undoubting quiet of those few days in the cottage with Moira. This, his mission, had been to destroy the vampire that usurped Maria del Ciello's body, but now that it was over, he felt no better, only tired and sad. The battle still raged, and he supposed that he must join on the side of the angels, but if all his summer afternoons were lost to him, as Wesley knew they were, he'd much rather have gone down into a cool, dark place to sleep the day, the night--and perhaps his life--away.

Wesley sighed. That, he well knew, was no longer a possibility: to hide, to hold back, to deny what he was, or what existed in the world around him, would only serve to amplify the rival voices of the tormenting demon lodged within him, and of his own tormented soul. Only in action would he find any sort of peace.

Stake in hand, he walked up the rise toward the half-opened door. A few moments earlier, that particular portal had seemed to stand on its own, connected to nothing, but now it had gained a framework of stained grey walls, a roof above and, from what he could see, a floor below. Odd, really: nothing appeared as it should, and yet, as Wesley crossed the threshhold, everything seemed familiar. He stood within a copy of the library of Sunnydale High and, simultaneously, he stood at the Mouth of hell.

For a moment his senses reeled as they tried to reconcile these conflicting images. Within the unnatural chamber, vampires circled with avid faces, their appetites whetted beyond restraint by the nearness of the Hellmouth, their natural cruelty aroused beyond any possibility of restraint. The Slayer knelt in their midst: slight shoulders bowed, lips parted, her wide blue-grey eyes blank and lost.

Buffy crouched on an uneven floor of broken stone and concrete that, nonetheless, seemed to have been arranged in patterns strangely reminiscent of the library lino. Except for the vampires, she was alone, although her hand pressed hard against the throat of a woman who, by the quantities of blood splashed around her, must surely be dead.

To take on the on the ridged, hideous features of demon self posed no real challenge: the scent of blood filled the air, spicy and delicious, and, with disgust, Wesley felt rise within himself the same avidity the others of his kind so blatantly displayed.

He must view this as a job of acting, Wesley told himself--a theatrical, like those he'd performed as a boy at school. These other, soulless vampires must be allowed to see only that mask of inhuman greed, not the self-disgust that lay beneath it, not the pity for the fallen woman or for the girl who knelt beside her.

Oddly, Wesley had never in his life considered himself tall, but when he'd pulled himself up to his full height, he looked down on every vampire in the room. "What--" he began in his coldest, crispest, most utterly arrogant tones, "Do you think that you're about here?"

Not even bothering to look where he was going, he strode through the open doorway, staking the first vampire that crossed his path, then another, then another. The first two he recognized, vaguely, as former minions, the third was unfamiliar.

"Is this yours?" he hissed, feeling his amber eyes exude a cold fire. "Is ANY of this yours?"

A vampire in a tartan flannel shirt and red braces began to stammer an excuse of some sort. Wesley staked him with perfect off-handedness before turning his cold gaze from one, to the next, to the next. All quailed before him: many had in fact once served him, many more apparently knew his reputation, for murmurs and mutters arose from the throng, and there seemed to be a general withdrawal into the shadows--Lord, they were cowards, for all their hellish powers--followed by the whisper of multiple retreats, out through the open doorway.

Wesley waited, cold-eyed, unmoving, until the last of them had gone, their desire for the Hellmouth and what it might offer apparently less, for these intruders, than their fear of him. In truth, he would have staked the lot of them, had it been possible, without a qualm. He wished that he had it in him to enjoy his new reputation.

In the silence that followed, he stood still for a moment and listened as the Hellmouth offered him all this dark world: ever-growing power, a never-ceasing flow of blood, an end to the torturous voices of guilt and conscience.

"But you don't understand," Wesley murmured. "I've had all that. All of it. I never needed you to give it to me."

The unnatural voice stilled, but Wesley could feel its presence still: baleful, watchful, malicious and unsleeping. He turned his back upon its seeming source, a jagged crack in the library floor, and went to Buffy's side. There he knelt beside her, brushing the draggled, sweat-soaked locks away from her honey-gold skin. She did not respond to his touch, even by blinking, and her eyes held no focus.

Wesley laid a hand across her wrist, feeling for the over-rapid pulse that he could quite clearly detect with his ears alone: clearly, she dreamed profoundly, and was aware of very little of the world outside. God, why wasn't Rupert here? He knew Buffy better than anyone might--was she often like this, enraptured...gone?

Dammit, he was going to crack up on this one too, ignorant as he was of both the location, and the people involved. He was going to let down his side again, just as he always had.

Distantly he heard music: an organ spinning out a Bach fugue, notes chasing notes, each phrase adding a little more to the picture building in his head,

He knelt in the overgrown garden behind the cottage, Moira's body stretched out before him, a long shape darker than the darkness. Slowly, he bent to her, tasting the warm sweetness of her skin. Her left hand gripped, hard on his arm, but she'd no longer the strength to push him away. Tenderly as he could, he bit into the softness of her throat--but when the hot, salt blood surged into his mouth he could not control his arousal. He bit deeper, and deeper still, pulling in great draughts of her wonderful heat, feeling altogether alive for the first time since she'd left him alone at LAX.

Trembling with passion, he clawed at his own wrist, the cold skin giving way at last beneath his nails. As Moira shuddered and gasped, he pressed his hand over her face, the torn wrist against her lips. She fought him as best she could but, again, her body failed her. She was nearly drained, her heartbeat failing. Wesley watched her eyes dim, her lungs fight for one last breath--and that breath drew his blood into her unwilling mouth.

Slowly, slowly, the light returned to her. Slowly, she sat up, a slight scowl in her face that gradually faded, only to be replaced by something as hard, cold and brilliant as a diamond. "What have you done?" she asked, in a voice Wesley hardly recognized.

"I..." his own voice faltered. The excuses that he'd meant to give: that he wanted her to live, that he wanted to heal her, seemed flimsy as tissue. All he'd done was restore Moira's body to an inhuman perfection. That immortal shell no longer held anything of the woman he loved so desperately.

A chill smile curved her full and lovely lips as she gazed across at him, "Wesley," she said, "You always were a fool."

Somewhere, distantly, music played. Somewhere equally far off, something watched and mocked. Wesley sank down to all fours--then realized, with a start, that the ground beneath him wasn't a carpet of grass, moss and twigs, but an uneven plane of dust-covered stone. Blindly, he reached out, his hand encountering a woman's leg that wasn't Moira's leg at all, though he couldn't have said how he knew the difference.

The illusion shattered, and he knelt once more beside the Hellmouth, the young Slayer facing him and a woman's outstretched body between them. He'd never seen the woman before in his life.

Wesley blinked, the last cobwebs of the unreality he'd slipped into blowing away. The unconscious woman smelt strongly of blood, but the odour no longer enticed him. He reached out to feel the pulse in her throat--a bit thready, but much stronger than he'd expected. Her throat hadn't be cut, as he'd first thought, though someone appeared to have given it a bloody good try. Rather, the blade appeared to have caught and bounced up from her collarbone, slashing a messy furrow across her chest.

Without pausing to consider, Wesley tore off his own shirt, pressing the fabric hard against the gash.

"Hey..." a slurred voice called out to him.

Wesley glanced up to see Xander weaving in his direction. A deep cut in the boy's scalp bled copiously across his cheek and the side of his neck, staining his shirt with dark crimson.

"Get...get 'way from her." The boy stumbled and went to his knees, appearing confused by the fact that he no longer was moving forward. "'m gonna stop...gonna stop..."

"Xander," Wesley told him, in as soothing a voice as he could muster, "I'm not going to hurt her. It's all right. You're safe now. The vampires have gone."

"'cept you," Xander muttered with a weak belligerence.

"But I'm the only one. I've made the others go."

"All gone?" The boy raised a hand to his bleeding head. "Ouch. Did we win?"

"We won," Wesley assured him, watching several emotions flicker across Xander's face: fear, anger, confusion--but no trace of the pride one might have expected. The boy had held his ground, and held it well, yet his mind could only conceive of failure and loss. "YOU won, that is," Wesley told him gently. "You fought very well, Xander. All that was left for me was a bit of clean-up."

Several seconds passed as Xander processed his words. "We won?" he said at last in a small voice. "We didn't die?" He blinked, and seemed to achieve a better state of focus. "Will's spell worked on you, right? You're not evil anymore?"

Wesley had to look away from the blind hope on the boy's face. "Yes," he said, fighting to keep his own voice calm and soothing. "Willow's spell worked perfectly. You've nothing whatsoever to fear from me."

In her heart, maybe even in her head, Buffy knew none of it was real, that everything she experienced at the moment was nothing more than good ol' hi-jinks on the Hellmouth Ferris Wheel of Fun. All she had to do was distance herself from what it showed her, because lies were lies--and like it said in that old song Giles liked to sing when he was feeling tuneful: "We won't get fooled again."

Except that the Hellmouth could fool her. It could show her this stuff over and over, and no matter how bogus she knew it had to be, the possibility of those possibilities still hurt her like an arrow through the chest. Buffy could deny all she liked, but the echoes still came down to her: What if... What if...

In the fake Hellmouth-world Buffy had a sister--which was just über-weird, considering she'd always been an only child. She wasn't even all that sure how many times her parents actually slept together after she was born, what with their non-stop fighting, added to her dad's equally non-stop cheating on her mom.

But here, through the looking-glass, she had a little sister named Dawn, and her mom was dead. More than that, for some reason this faux-sister--whom Buffy knew wasn't real, even by the standards of Bizarro World-- meant more to her than anything or anyone, so much that she'd out-and-out told Giles that she'd hurt him, maybe even kill him, if he tried to stand in her way when she protected Dawn from the evil-creature-of-the-year. She'd heard her own angry voice shouting the words, and watched that hurt, closed-down, frozen look come over Giles's face. He didn't shout back at her. In fact, he spoke very gently, which just made things worse, didn't it?

She wouldn't take his gentleness, his care or his protection. She wouldn't take anything. There was fire and falling and pain.

And then she was dead. Dead, cold, lying in her grave. Only not forever. She came back: skin grew over her bones, her eyes rose up in their sockets, and she lived with a moment of complete fear that stretched out to forever when she realized exactly where she was. Screaming and clawing and clawing her way out, hoping by some hope that none of it could actually be happening, except that it was.

Staggering blurry-eyed through burning streets, the voices of her friends hounding her, and knowing, suddenly that they had been the ones to bring her back, because they were all worried, and wouldn't meet her eyes, and Willow stank of magic the way a wino stank of cheap booze. And no Giles, because with her gone, he'd left for home, for England.

But he came back for her, as soon as he could. In the middle of all the hurting and the fear, there he was, all big and solid and Giles-like, with his warm voice and his kind eyes, his strong hand softly touching her back, her shoulder, but never, never the rest of her, the way her real self wanted.

Please, she cried out to him, Please, I'm here. I love you. I'll never go away again.

But because you could expect no love from the Hellmouth, only hate and pain, he couldn't hear her, only the twice-dead shadow-Buffy, who turned from him, ignored him, leaned on him but at the same time shut him out, skulking in alleys and crypts and up against grungy walls with Spike. With Spike? She shuddered, and felt dirty. She couldn't believe it, just couldn't believe it, while at the same time she saw the thing, the darkness inside her, that could make it all come true.

Please, she cried out again, terrified, to no one, Please, I'll do anything, but don't make me live this life.

Suddenly she sat in the strange little room she'd seen before, the one with the overstuffed chair with the grandmotherly upholstery and the doilies everywhere. Someone shook the snowglobe and she tumbled into a warm, musty, leathery smell of old books. The lights dimmed, and Buffy heard the faint "clink" of china on china as someone poured Earl Grey tea into a Blue Willow cup.

"But remember," said a little, fussy, British voice, "You promised me anything I asked for."

Buffy shook her head violently, stinging tears flooding her eyes. "Not that," she begged. "Take anything else, but don't take love away from me. I can't be that person. I can't."

A dry chuckle answered her cry, and the words, "You must remember, dear: you promised me."